Professor Tim Flannery, and his daughter, Emma Flannery, bring the Megalodon to life in this fascinating and engaging natural history.
BIG MEG:
The Story of the Rise and Fall of the Largest and Most Mysterious Predator that Ever Lived
by Tim & Emma Flannery
Text Publishing, August 2023
Its name means giant tooth but everything about it is gigantic, including its pull on the human imagination. Tim and Emma Flannery’s BIG MEG will not only tell the story of the Megalodon, the Great Shark itself—what we know about where and how it lived, bred, hunted and died, a shark whose size and ferocity are the stuff of nightmares and whose teeth are probably the most sought after fossils in the world—but also how it continues to fascinate us.
The great shark, aka Otodus megalodon, the big meg, was the largest predator that ever stalked the planet weighing somewhere between fifty and 100 tonnes. We know that this leviathan was warm blooded, that it had the most powerful bite of any animal ever to have lived and that it could open that mighty jaw to a gape of three metres, wide enough to take a killer whale whole.
BIG MEG will be not only the biography of a phenomenal animal, but a compelling exploration of the role it plays in the popular imagination. The Megalodon might have been extinct for more than three million years but it flourishes in the stories we tell about it, in our hunt for its relics, and our quest to uncover more of the mystery surrounding it.
Tim Flannery is a scientist, an explorer, a conservationist and a leading writer on climate change. He has held various academic positions including visiting Professor in Evolutionary and Organismic Biology at Harvard University, Director of the South Australian Museum, Principal Research Scientist at the Australian Museum, Professorial Fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, University of Melbourne, and Panasonic Professor of Environmental Sustainability, Macquarie University. His books include the award-winning international bestseller The Weather Makers, Here on Earth, Atmosphere of Hope and Europe: The First 100 Million Years.
Emma Flannery is a scientist and writer. She has explored caves, forests and oceans across most of the globe’s continents in search of the elusive fossils, animals and plants. With postgraduate experience in geology, chemistry and palaeontology, Emma’s research and writing has been published in scientific journals, children’s books and a number of museum-based adult education tours. She has worked for and with universities, government agencies and museums.
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